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From Daleks to Zombies: What Monsters Mean to Us

By Anna North October 27, 2014 11:26 amOctober 27, 2014 11:26 am

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Credit Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

“They’re completely inhuman,” says Justin Richards. “They have an eye but it doesn’t look anything like an eye, and they’ve got a hand of sorts but it doesn’t look anything like a hand, and they have no legs. So it’s something totally different from what we’re used to either in the real world or in science fiction.”

That’s how Mr. Richards, author of the new book “Doctor Who: The Secret Lives of Monsters,” explains the appeal of the Dalek. He credits the iconic mutants in mechanical cases with making monsters such an integral part of “Doctor Who.” “Once the Daleks appeared and were really successful,” he told Op-Talk, the BBC “realized that monsters and aliens were something that could grab the public’s attention and imagination.”

Part of that appeal may lie in the way monsters recast collective anxiety in fictional form. “One of the major functions that monsters provide for us is they let us process our fears about the real world without having to look at them too directly,” says David J. Skal, author of “The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror.” He and others who study the monstrous say that we can read the dominant worries of an era in its monster stories — and that while those stories can sometimes help us deal with those worries, they can also make things worse.

Ancient Greek and Roman monsters tended to be inspired “by xenophobic fears of the other,” Stephen T. Asma, a philosophy professor and the author of “On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears,” told Op-Talk. As Greeks and Romans came into contact with other cultures through trade, they told stories of groups of people born with only one leg or with human bodies but the heads of dogs.

Medieval monsters were often “supernatural demons that come out of Christian theology.” Christians in medieval Europe were “worried about temptation and pleasures of the flesh” and believed that “if you’re weak morally and impure, if you give in to your carnal desires, then that opens the door for the demon to enter and take you over,” he said. “If you let your guard down at all, this evil realm is just waiting.”

Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” meanwhile, came out at a time when experiments like Galvani’s with electricity were challenging previous ideas about the basis of life. “People were really nervous because it looked like, ‘well, that’s all there is to life — it’s not really miraculous, it’s just a material machine,’” said Dr. Asma. “So Frankenstein comes out of that anxiety.”

According to Mr. Skal, Lon Chaney’s disfigured characters of the 1920s reflect a fear of those marked by World War I: “Unprecedented numbers of wounded and maimed soldiers were coming back and being reintegrated into American society very uneasily — we didn’t like to look at them.” Chaney never played a wounded veteran, said Mr. Skal, “but on one level that’s all he played.”

Tod Browning’s “Dracula” and James Whale’s “Frankenstein” both came out in 1931, and Mr. Skal believes “these classic movie monsters served as kind of lightning rods for free-floating fears and anxieties” in the depths of the Great Depression. Dracula, he said, was “this mysterious, draining presence, the wolf at every door. And the Frankenstein monster in his work clothes and asphalt-spreader boots, he was like this mute, pathetic representation of displaced workers abandoned by their masters.”

Fears of nuclear war may have inspired monsters, too. Ishiro Honda’s 1954 “Godzilla,” Dr. Asma noted, “deals heavily with the kind of anxieties that you would have after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Mr. Richards pointed out that the Daleks, who “evolved out of nuclear devastation” on their home planet, made their TV debut in 1963, soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

And today’s pre-eminent monster is the zombie, says Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, an English professor who has studied the relationship between monsters and culture. The zombie “has been our ascendant monster” for nearly a decade, he told Op-Talk, and “it shows no sign of declining in interest.”

Zombies aren’t new, he said: “There is a monster that every single culture shares, and it’s the body that comes back. So every culture has it, almost every time has it.” And the word “zombie” first entered American literature in 1938, he said, with Zora Neale Hurston’s book “Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica.”

The current American version of the zombie, though, emerged around the time of the most recent financial crisis: “Zombies make good figures for things like creditors or debtors or people reduced in an abject state that they can’t get out of.” And now, he’s concerned that zombies will become even more dominant, as an expression of our fears about Ebola.

“A lot of the rhetoric around how to deal with Ebola is the rhetoric of how to deal with a zombie apocalypse,” he said, “and if those potentially carrying the virus get treated as monsters, we’ve already lost a valuable battle by doing that.”

“All the stuff we know about zombies is not going to help us to be more humane to help people who have Ebola,” he added. “We still have to treat them. They’re not a contagion to be managed.”

And monsters don’t just reflect what we’re feeling, he said. They can influence us too: “Once they’re out there, they bring stuff with them.” His concern about “using the knowledge we have about zombies and not being upfront about the ways in which we’re figuring Ebola as a kind of zombie plague, is that then we bring in a whole set of assumptions that we’re probably better off talking about rather than just assuming.” Monsters, he added, “actually do cultural work, and sometimes that cultural work is kind of icky.”

But it doesn’t always have to be. He pointed to the vampire novels of Anne Rice: “They were about creatures with a blood disease, at a time of AIDS,” but they offered “an argument that the vampire is not a thing to be feared but in some ways to be even envied or celebrated.” Ms. Rice’s work, he said, was “about overcoming homophobia without really even talking about that.”

“It wasn’t necessarily reflecting a tolerant society,” he argued, “but it was envisioning one and I think trying somewhat successfully to help bring that about.”

Dr. Asma believes monsters can offer catharsis. Horror films, he explained, can give us a controllable way to experience “these deeper fears that we ordinarily repress.” We can “take our monsters off the chain, let him howl at the moon a little bit, and then you can put him back on the chain after the movie’s over,” he said. “I think monster culture has therapeutic aspects to it.”

And maybe monsters can help us confront some of our anxieties about ourselves. Mr. Richards sees the Daleks today as speaking to the feeling “that as a society we’ve become more and more reliant on technology.”

“These are creatures who’ve become overdependent on technology and they can’t survive without it,” he explained. “The Dalek is in effect a life support machine which the creature lives inside.”

“With all the best monsters,” he added, “you can see something of yourself in them.”

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